SAFE's Impact: Speculation, Anyone?

If you want to call this communism… for me it’s more oligarcho-capitalism, pretty much the same as in the US, just without a constitution and with more obedient people… (and without pseudo-democracy)

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I was assuming that because a user is charged safecoin to store data, that users can own safecoin and presumably thus not spend safecoin. In which case, exchanges could simply require users that wish to participate in an exchange to install an app that would prevent user X from spending safecoin amount C until user Y sent user X a message to send safecoin amount C to user Y, thus in effect, making the safecoins in question available to an exchange by freezing the safecoins. However, this was an assumption so I checked the white paper on safecoins linked just to make sure that the safe network didn’t do things in some uncooperative way.

After checking the white paper on safecoins, I believe you meant that the safe network allows people to trade safecoins on the network and effectively take safecoins out of use, thus making this idea redundant, or you thought I was talking about freezing people’s bank accounts like the thugs in blue do. If the latter is the case, then I apologize for my lack of ability to clearly articulate my point. If the former, than I’m not sure where the problem is.

Speaking of health SAFE will also allow people to study naturuopathy and other alternative medicines and practice them while retaining their anonymity somewhat. I mean one will have to see patients and get supplies at some point, hence the somewhat, but the aonymous communication and transactions afforded by SAFE would increase one’s privacy and security. Natural practitioners have been being assassinated as of late, at least in the states, and so it’s getting rather dangerous to practice this line of medicine openly. Killing off divergent opinions and fields of study is NOT science. Also SAFE would allow for a decentralized and permant repository of knowledge for the findings of one’s studies that one could publish to the community for others to use.

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Prediction: Mesh networks will soon be established everywhere where there is inadequate reach of the Internet backbone.

Reason:

  1. There are emerging mesh network technologies, such as libre-mesh, which can be flashed onto consumer wifi routers.

  2. The creation of such mesh networks has no economic incentives but instead relies on philosophical, political, and community/tribal concerns. But it is a truism that money is the universal motivator.

  3. Safe network is agnostic about the underlying transport: it will operate over mesh networks.

  4. Safe network introduces an economic incentive to run Safe vaults.

  5. Smart contracts, via Ethereum or a Turing-complete scripting add-on for Bitcoin such as Rootstock (rootstock.io) enable the economic incentivisation for the operation of gateways between the Internet backbone and local mesh networks.

  6. Because of 4. & 5., expect that local mesh networks will have access to the Internet at relatively high-quality of service and low cost (a small premium compared to well-serviced areas of the Internet.

  7. Examples would include: Cuba, China, North Korea, or anywhere where geographical or political limitations apply.

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Forget Korea, try rural parts of Canada and the U.S. There are huge swaths of land across North America with no, or severely limited, internet access.

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

I think the safe network will empower people to labor in freedom. And going along with this quote I think we will see some truly great and inspiring things. I could see governments Of, By and For the people. I could see businesses focusing on transparency and freedom. Many on-demand workforces where people are doing what they love vs. what pays their bills. I could see the shadow dealings of our days exposed. I can also see the truly evil using it for their endeavors as well. I’m excited about the good stuff and that is why I will keep investing my time, energy and money into seeing it become a reality.

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At this stage, it seems like a glorified distributed dropbox service to me.

The ability to run a very simple website without the apparent ability to do anything dynamic (server side, there being no server concept and all) is, as far as I can see it, quite limiting.

For that and other reasons I don’t see this technology ever coming close to replacing the internet as we know it, and it seems misguided to even suggest such a thing is in scope.

This is not to say it cannot be incredibly useful. A lot of doors will open for the sharing of uncensorable content (for better and for worse; but in my opinion it’s an inseparable aspect of wanting freedom that some other people will be doing things one finds distasteful… and in some cases they might have to be stopped, but not at the expense of everyone else’s rights), something for which HTML+CSS+JS is more than enough.

And as the glorified decentralized dropbox, if the cards are played right, I believe it will be a very easy sell for nontechnical people (I’ve inquired several dozen nontechnical friends/acquaintances, almost all of them were very interested in the concept).

I’ve been following the crossroads podcast and catching up over the last year (having only just begun to follow this project in earnest), so it’s already acknowledged that making the system easy to use by default is a core tenet.

I think for such nontechnical people, the devs can take the principle even further … forget the username and password and pin, just generate them randomly for the user, and present a very simple interface through which the information could be recovered … literally just install, have access to the decentralized storage.

Of course, while keeping advanced features available for more technically minded people.

So anyway, being a newbie this might be too limited a view, but without dynamic websites (non client side) and not being able to point .safenet addresses to actual endpoints (by design), I find the functionality here severely limiting. Valuable, but limited/ing.

In conclusion, it seems to me the majority of people will find value in the secure decentralized store concept rather than any other aspect of the network/software.

@karnal, I believe that dynamic websites from non-mutable data is a quickly developing technology and your concerns about “no dynamic data” are rather unfounded.

GIT for example is a dynamic website driven by immutable data… It is only a matter of time before people change their bad habits and move away from “place centered” data storage and move to a more “address centered” data storage…

When we build websites we want to communicate a “value” to our user, Not what happens to be in cell 4 of row 132 of a database table someplace. A tree of references pointing to immutable values is superior to storing the values in tables and constantly erasing them and putting new ones in… It is only a matter of time before programs emerge that have all of the functionality of our current client server database driven models that use Merkle trees and persistent datasets instead.

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It does take a fair amount of time and effort to start having those epiphany moments with safenetwork; where your mind is suddenly blown and your jaw falls slack as you start to see the potential implications. It took me a while anyway.

Keep reading and researching though, when you start to see how deep this rabbit hole goes you’ll realise saying it could replace the current internet is more of an understatement than hyperbole. It can do so much more and so much better, it could help us to integrate and connect with each other and technology in a vastly superior way. No one can see the future, but we all have to make educated guesses with the limited information we have available.

I don’t think even the most optimistic and enthusiastic among us quite realise how big this technology could be, however it manifests itself. Maybe the first SAFE will get successfully attacked while it’s still vulnerable, maybe the tech will get used in a different way, or on a different network. Who knows?!

At the moment though it seems crazy to me not accept the possibility that SAFE itself could become the most ubiquitous technology on the planet. :confused:

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I always get reminded of that clip of Bill Gates trying to explain the internet to David Letterman back in the day…lol.
SAFE will surely be used the same way…for things that haven’t even been dreamed up yet!

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I see any area that requires mandated storage requirements (Healthcare, Financial, Legal, even government) having a significantly lower cost burden using SAFE in place of the current systems.

I work in finance and the requirements for document storage to meet compliance standards is outrageously expensive. All local servers and cloud servers must be audited and certified which severely limits the use of a lot of services such as dropbox, etc.

SAFE, I believe, will be able to open up access to many more options for storage, data redundancy and lowered costs.

Making the apps/UIs that run these new systems will be highly lucrative I would imagine! :smile:

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What languages would be best to learn to be a developer in this space?

I was thinking of Erlang:

“Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang’s runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance.” https://www.erlang.org/

Depends what platform you want to develop for. My first app will run in the browser, so it’s mostly javascript for me.

It isn’t about a language. It’s about the problem or use case. Different tools for different problems so it is unfair to provide a general answer. The best thing to learn is how to learn something when it is the best fit for that particular problem.

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I think encrypted messaging will grow the fasted at first, followed by “copycat” services that the legacy Internet provides. I think Silicon Valley investors will jump on board to get in early

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well the front end app can connect to the SAFE API, so pretty much whatever you want.

I have heard people doing stuff in HTML/CSS/JS, C++, etc. but you can actual have websites tap right into the API as well.

Some of the more popular tools I have heard are QT and Electron , however I would LOVE to see some game engines using SAFE as a back end! :wink:

Yes, the safe api is accessible via web browsers, which opens up a whole wealth of possibilities.

I wouldn’t underestimate how dynamic sites can be made without relying on server side execution too.

Early dynamic sites will likely be single owner editing content for read only consumers. This will be great for blogs immediately. Moreover, there is nothing to stop the link g of a series of different URLs to the same site, giving multi user like capabilities to content creation.

Moving beyond this, creating local day (e.g. a file) and sending a reference to another user will soon be feasible. This opens up possibilities of distributed sites, such as forums like this, but where posters physically own the data in the post on their vault. More needs to be fleshed out in the API for this, but solutions have already been discussed here.

With messaging, we have ways to send stuff between users, anonymously and instantly. Integrating this into apps will open up many possibilities too.

Sure, some things are hard to do without server side solutions, but with the right tooling/libraries, it may be easier than a lot of people think.

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I realized a lot of the potential right away. What’s taking a lot of time for me is the “how.” Things like learning programmming or understanding the API is what’s slowing me down more than grasping the potential applications of what could be done with SAFE.

The quick confirmation of Safecoin suggests gambling of all kinds.

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